“Sure is, Bob.”

“You know Gustavsson’s here?”

“Everything all right?” She felt the familiar metallic taste in her mouth whenever she heard Sven’s name.

“Everyone accounted for. Think they’re just having a bite to eat before they head off. Last saw them over by B Block.”

She dismounted and tied up the mule, then walked through the gates, ignoring the glances from miners clocking off. She walked briskly past the commissary, its windows advertising various on-sale bargains that everyone knew to be no bargain at all. It stood on the hillside at the same level as the huge tipple. Above it were the generous, well-maintained houses of the mine bosses and their foremen, most with neat backyards. This was where Van Cleve would have lived, had Dolores not refused to leave her family home back in Baileyville. It was not one of the larger coal camps, like Lynch, where some ten thousand homes scattered the hillsides. Here a couple of hundred miners’ shacks stretched along the tracks, their roofs covered with tar-paper, barely updated in the forty-odd years of their existence. A few children, mostly shoeless, played in the dirt beside a rootling pig. Car parts and washing pails were strewn outside front doors, and stray dogs trotted haphazard paths between them. Margery turned right, away from the residential roads, and walked briskly over the small bridge that led to the mines.

She spied his back first. He was sitting on an upturned crate, his helmet cradled between his feet as he ate a hunk of bread. She’d know him anywhere, she thought. The way his neck met his shoulders and his head tilted a little to the left when he spoke. His shirt was covered with smuts and the tabard that read “FIRE” on his back was slightly askew.

“Hey.”

He turned at the sound of her voice, stood and lifted his hands as his workmates began a series of low whistles, as if he were trying to tamp down a fire. “Marge! What are you doing here?” He took her arm, steering her away from the catcalls as they walked around the corner.

She looked at Sven’s blackened palms. “Everyone okay?”

His eyebrows lifted. “This time.” He shot a look at the administrative offices that told her everything she needed to know.

She reached up and wiped a smudge from his face with her thumb. He stopped her and pressed her hand to his lips. It always made something flip inside her, even if she didn’t let it show on her face.

“You missed me, then?”

“No.”

“Liar.”

They grinned at each other.

“I came to find William Kenworth. I need to speak to his sister.”

“Colored William? He isn’t here no more, Marge. He got injured out, oh, six, nine months back.”

She looked startled.

“I thought I told you. Some powder monkey messed up his wires and he was in the way when they blasted that tunnel through Feller’s Top. Boulder took his leg clean off.”

“So where is he now?”

“No idea. I can find out, though.”

 

* * *

 

• • •

She waited outside the administrative offices while Sven went in and sweet-talked Mrs. Pfeiffer, whose favorite word was “no” but she rarely used it on Sven. Everyone across the five coal patches of Lee County loved Sven. He had, along with solid shoulders and fists the size of hams, an air of quiet authority, a twinkle in his eye, which told men he was one of them, and women he liked them, not just in that way. He was good at his job, kind when he felt he needed to be, and he spoke to everyone with the same uncommon civility, whether it was a ragged-trousered kid from the next holler, or the big bosses at the mine. Most days she could reel off a whole list of the things she liked about Sven Gustavsson. Not that she’d tell him.

He came down the steps from the office holding a piece of paper. “He’s over at Monarch Creek, at his late mother’s place. Been pretty poorly by all accounts. Turns out they’d only treat him the first couple of months in the hospital here, then he was out.”

“Good of them.”

Sven knew well how little she regarded Hoffman. “What do you want him for, anyway?”

“I wanted to find his sister. But if he’s sick, I don’t know if I should be bothering him. Last I heard she was working in Louisville.”

“Oh, no. Mrs. Pfeiffer just told me his sister’s the one looking out for him. Chances are you head over there, you’ll find her, too.”

She took the piece of paper from him and looked up. His eyes were on her, and his face softened under the black. “So when will I see you?”

“Depends when you stop yammering on about getting married.”

He glanced behind him, then pulled her around the corner, placing her back against the wall as he stood close, as close as he could get. “Okay, how’s this? Margery O’Hare, I solemnly promise never to marry you.”

“And?”

“And I won’t talk about marrying you. Or sing songs about it. Or even think about marrying you.”

“Better.”

He glanced around him, then lowered his voice, placing his mouth beside her ear so that she squirmed a little. “But I will stop by and do sinful things to that fine body of yours. If you’ll allow me.”

“How sinful?” she whispered.

“Oh. Bad. Ungodly.”

She slid her hand inside his overalls, feeling the faint sheen of sweat on his warm skin. For a moment it was just the two of them. The sounds and scents of the mine receded, and all she could feel was the thumping of her heart, the pulse of his skin against hers, the ever-present drumbeat of her need for him. “God loves a sinner, Sven.” She reached up and kissed him, then delivered a swift bite to his lower lip. “But not as much as I do.”

He burst out laughing and, to her surprise, as she walked back to the mule, the safety crew’s catcalls still ringing out, her cheeks had gone quite, quite pink.

 

* * *

 

• • •

It had been a long day, and by the time she reached the little cabin at Monarch Creek, both she and the mule were weary. She dismounted and threw her reins over the post.

“Hello?”

Nobody emerged. A carefully tended vegetable patch lay to the left of the cabin, and a small lean-to skimmed it, with two baskets hanging from the porch. Unlike most of the houses around this holler, it was freshly painted, the grass trimmed and weeds beaten into submission. A red rocker sat by the door looking out across the water meadow.

“Hello?”

A woman’s face appeared at the screen door. She glanced out, as if checking something, then turned away, speaking to someone inside. “That you, Miss Margery?”